How can I see the date multiple files were created on git?

Question

I want to see the date of git creation (date of first commit where they were added) of all the files on a specified directory.

Answer 1

I'll break my solution into steps.

Get a list of all files in the repository

$ git ls-files

This returns a list of relative paths of all files in the repository.

Get the SHA-1 of the first commit of a given file:

$ git rev-list HEAD <file> | tail -n 1

This will return a list of all parentless commits for a given file, in reverse chronological order. The last one is the SHA-1 hash of the first commit for the given file.

You can verify this by running git log --raw <hash>. You should see something like:

commit <commit_hash>
Author: Susy Q <[email protected]>
Date:   Wed Aug 24 12:36:34 2011 -0400

    Add new module 'example.py'

:000000 100644 0000000... <hash>... A  example.py

Show the date of a given commit

$ git show -s --format="%ci" <hash>

Bringing it all together in a bash script:

#!/bin/bash
for file in $(git ls-files)
do
    HASH=$(git rev-list HEAD "$file" | tail -n 1)
    DATE=$(git show -s --format="%ci" $HASH --)
    printf "%-35s %s\n  %s\n" "$file" $HASH: "$DATE"
done